gillsr

There are also other up and coming storage media that you don't really see talked about that are starting to come through like MRAM that essentially uses tiny magnets (like core memory) it has unlimited write cycles and is almost as fast as SRAM and could in future be as small as SRAM cells. This then makes you start to wonder where RAM begins and mass storage starts... Could be great for these devices running a 64 bit OS with converged memory and storage of many gigabytes. (See WikiP for more upcoming NVRAM types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-volatile_memory)

I have been wondering if MS has been investigating IP speaker/soundcard system that can be detected with uPnP?

So you can have stand alone speakers for kitchen, bedrooms, etc (ala Apple Airport Express) then be able to name them in windows and redirect audio to one or all of them for a home sound system and then share them with other devices like laptops, media centres, etc
Would be quite interesting and would not need a big multichannel system that is wired to speakers all over the house.

Interesting stuff - as he says, inevitable!

I would like to hear more about the Itanium and any long term plans to really leverage it, rather than carry on treating it as the next x86.

I bumped into a guy on a Train the other month who is selling a Grid-micro-OS that runs in the L2 cache on Itanium systems that can process data used in science and banking systems 4x-10x faster than the best x86 systems because they are data flow driven and drive the Itanium at near full whack by keeping it supplied by lots of concurrent units of work. He was saying that some of his customers have been able to easily halve the number of computing nodes used to process their data, with capacity to spare.

He was also mentioning about scaling apps up across processors, dual cores, grid nodes, etc and that there has to be a shift in how software is designed, from multi-threaded to "multi process" so that parallel parts of an app can run anywhere, not just on one node/CPU.
I can see this as very important since clock speeds are unlikely to rise soon, but the number of cores is in the near future. I'm sure that's the sort of thing Indigo is for though...

I would reccomend the D-Link adaptor, v small and seems to work well for me and my obex app! There are only a few bluetooth chipset manufacturers (each with their own driver) so it is strange that your dongle is not supported by windows natively.